This week, try to pay attention to how your teacher asks questions and facilitates discussion in his or her classes. What types of questions does your CT ask? Are most of the questions asking students to relay facts or textbook definitions (recall) or to apply a concept to a new situation or compare it to another concept (application or analysis). Does your teacher ever encourage his or her students to be critical or skeptical? If so, when and how? Does your CT ever ask students to provide evidence to support a claim or explain their thinking? Does your teacher facilitate classroom discussion so that students are expressing scientific ideas to other students? Finally, does your CT vary the type of questions he or she asks depending on the level of the class, or the perceived ability of the student? Remember to reflect on what types of classroom discourse you want to foster in your classroom, how you will go about doing this, and why.
Observations:
This week i observed my students conducting the annual kite experiment. I observed two classes. One class was a "hands-on" physics course consisting of seniors who were most likely interested in trades school after high school. This project was a side project along with the other in-class work for the kids. However, on this day the project involved 100% of the class. Before we left the room my CT began by explaining to the students how air has mass. He introduced an atmospheric bar and explained to them how the kites flew through the air not by the parachute affect, but by the airplane wing affect (allow known as Bernoulli's Principle). This way the students understood how to conduct the final step of their project: tying the string to the kites. Approximately 50% of the kites flew and 10% flew well. However, there was one kite made in the Physics 1 class that flew exceptionally well. This kite flew so well that the girl who made it ran out of string and connected the end of her string to another whole reel (supplied by a boy whose kite crashed violently prior). A picture of the top-performing kite is below:
This kite flew with approximately 100 yards of string attached.
Reflections:
When it came to the beginning discussion on air and how it behaves as a dynamic fluid, the questions posed were very different. In the first period i noticed the questions my CT posed to the students were very carefully constructed and gave them much the needed information to make an educated answer. However, during the second period (the Physics 1 class) my CT asked much of the same questions as before, however, he left the students to make their own conclusions and elaborations. Though i agree with my CT's method, i personally feel the introduction he provided to the lower level kids made much more of a real-world connection. Most weeks during my observation i try to pull myself "out-of-the-box" to see the lesson from a student's, a teacher's, and student teacher's, and an everyday person's perspective. What i noticed most this week was from a students perspective, the first demonstration to the lower level class touched home much more and allowed the students to improve their kids and apply the newly understood knowledge to something other than flying a kite (don't get me wrong fluid dynamics is no easy subject). The demonstration he gave to the higher level students was very dry and provoked no exterior thought. In fact, i feel that certain parts of the it the students did not even understand. Leading me to understand that simply because a group of the students has a lower expectation level than another; we should not assume that the more gifted students need not the same explanation as others. Lastly, i found my CT does not often require students to back up their justifications for insights into a topic because he often "leads them" onto the path towards a correct or quasi-correct response.
Class Topic: Kite, Etc.
Grade: 11, 12
Observed by: David Kenahan
This week, try to pay attention to how your teacher asks questions and facilitates discussion in his or her classes. What types of questions does your CT ask? Are most of the questions asking students to relay facts or textbook definitions (recall) or to apply a concept to a new situation or compare it to another concept (application or analysis). Does your teacher ever encourage his or her students to be critical or skeptical? If so, when and how? Does your CT ever ask students to provide evidence to support a claim or explain their thinking? Does your teacher facilitate classroom discussion so that students are expressing scientific ideas to other students? Finally, does your CT vary the type of questions he or she asks depending on the level of the class, or the perceived ability of the student? Remember to reflect on what types of classroom discourse you want to foster in your classroom, how you will go about doing this, and why.
Observations:
This week i observed my students conducting the annual kite experiment. I observed two classes. One class was a "hands-on" physics course consisting of seniors who were most likely interested in trades school after high school. This project was a side project along with the other in-class work for the kids. However, on this day the project involved 100% of the class. Before we left the room my CT began by explaining to the students how air has mass. He introduced an atmospheric bar and explained to them how the kites flew through the air not by the parachute affect, but by the airplane wing affect (allow known as Bernoulli's Principle). This way the students understood how to conduct the final step of their project: tying the string to the kites. Approximately 50% of the kites flew and 10% flew well. However, there was one kite made in the Physics 1 class that flew exceptionally well. This kite flew so well that the girl who made it ran out of string and connected the end of her string to another whole reel (supplied by a boy whose kite crashed violently prior). A picture of the top-performing kite is below:This kite flew with approximately 100 yards of string attached.
Reflections:
When it came to the beginning discussion on air and how it behaves as a dynamic fluid, the questions posed were very different. In the first period i noticed the questions my CT posed to the students were very carefully constructed and gave them much the needed information to make an educated answer. However, during the second period (the Physics 1 class) my CT asked much of the same questions as before, however, he left the students to make their own conclusions and elaborations. Though i agree with my CT's method, i personally feel the introduction he provided to the lower level kids made much more of a real-world connection. Most weeks during my observation i try to pull myself "out-of-the-box" to see the lesson from a student's, a teacher's, and student teacher's, and an everyday person's perspective. What i noticed most this week was from a students perspective, the first demonstration to the lower level class touched home much more and allowed the students to improve their kids and apply the newly understood knowledge to something other than flying a kite (don't get me wrong fluid dynamics is no easy subject). The demonstration he gave to the higher level students was very dry and provoked no exterior thought. In fact, i feel that certain parts of the it the students did not even understand. Leading me to understand that simply because a group of the students has a lower expectation level than another; we should not assume that the more gifted students need not the same explanation as others. Lastly, i found my CT does not often require students to back up their justifications for insights into a topic because he often "leads them" onto the path towards a correct or quasi-correct response.Class Topic: Kite, Etc.
Grade: 11, 12
Observed by: David Kenahan